Urban Echo

Now that mobile phones are ubiquitous, public phone booths are fast becoming obsolete. In a bid to find a viable new use for its 13,500 phone booths around the country, Telekom Austria has begun converting them into battery recharging stations for electric cars, scooters and motorbikes.

Unveiling its first phone booth-turned-recharging station in front of the company's Vienna headquarters in May, Telekom Austria announced plans to convert an additional 29 phone booths by the end of this year. During the initial trial period, recharging is free. The company eventually plans to charge a single-digit euro sum for the recharging service, with payments to be made via mobile phone.

Telekom Austria’s forward-thinking scheme comes at a time when, of the total 4.36 million cars on Austrian roads, there are only 223 electric cars and 3,559 hybrid cars registered. Yet the Austrian motor vehicle association, VOeC, predicts that the number of electric vehicles in Austria will rise to 405,000 by 2020. Telecommunications companies around the globe: a leap into the widely forecast EV-prevalent future worth following?

via SW

(Note: The above car is a Japanese WagonR 2008 model. The current Indian model is given below.)



The new WagonR is out. I've seen its TV ad. Car magazines have enthusiastically covered it. I've read the Top Gear article and it extols the car as a all round improvement with its updated design, interior, engine, lower base price. The engine is worrisome thanks to an article on what could be a new trend in higher price bracket hatchbacks: three cylinder engines. This - unintentional - counter-article questions why we have replaced yesteryear's four cylinder engines with "three pot" ones (I’m looking at you, Volkswagen Polo). The article does not investigate this further with concrete benchmarks but the point is clear: Aren't you supposed to get more car than the last generation for the money?

Let's get back to the TV ad. Madhavan is visualizing the new WagonR putting the square images together. The jigsaw is yet another boxy car. It's a base design niggle of using a minivan platform to build the car up. That should be forgivable given the car’s utilitarian concept until you look at pictures of the 2008 Japanese WagonR and its Stingray variant. But pause here again, remove those images from your mind and think a little deeper here. This is a car made for Indians and Indians (most of them) live in houses that more resemble containers that forgo aesthetics. In a country where the number of occupants in a house often outnumbers the number of rooms, the WagonR very well mirrors this situation. This very well fits India’s “blue-eyed boy”. Unfortunately, this means that there is still no decent alternative to the Alto and Santro in the sub 3.5 lakh rupees on-road price bracket.